Home entertainment systems, including television and media centers, are converging with the Internet and providing access to a large number of available sources of content, such as video, movies, TV programs, music, etc. This expansion in the number of available sources necessitates a new strategy for navigating a media interface associated with such systems and enabling access to certain portions of media content being consumed by the user.
The large number of possible content sources creates an interface challenge that has not yet been successfully solved in the field of home media entertainment. This challenge involves successfully presenting users with a large number of elements (programs, sources, etc.) without the need to tediously navigate through multiple display pages or hierarchies of content.
Content search algorithms have been implemented which enable the user to specify search terms relating to content of interest. However, there is a drawback associated with merely entering search terms to search for content that can be desirable to the user. A first drawback is that search algorithms tend to facilitate a global search of all available sources for any item having at least a portion of the entered search term. Often times a global search results in the return of a number of data items that are irrelevant to the user at a given time. For example, these global search algorithms can return data items that are not even multimedia content. A further drawback associated with conventional search technology relates to the difficulty in narrowing the types of data items to be searched and the particular locations to be searched.
An example of the aforementioned drawbacks can be found when considering gesture based searching performed using a device running the ANDROID® or IOS® operating system that executes programs enabling the use of gestures to conduct a search. The problem with such a search is they return ALL results matching the particular search term. This is unduly burdensome to a user and would require much time to sift through to locate any item of relevance. Thus, the drawback associated herewith is the lack of context provided as a result of the gesture search.